The Big Issue creates opportunities for people experiencing homelessness and people affected by poverty in multiple ways, we provide vendors with an opportunity to earn through selling the Big Issue magazine, we provide people facing barriers to work access to employment opportunities through Big Issue Recruit and through Big Issue Invest we invest in organisations providing core solutions to end poverty.
We support the individuals we work through our frontline service team to access basic services such as housing, health and wellbeing and financial and digital skills training.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4 to speak about the comments, Big Issue founder Lord Bird said: “What really struck me, when I was walking around the West End the other night about 11 o’clock, is that I didn’t see Suella going around with her clipboard talking to people. So the Home Office must have an enormous bank of data where they’ve gone around and talked to people about their lifestyle choices.
“This spurious form of statement, I don’t know where she’s getting it from. I don’t think it makes the government look good when they’re allowed to say this kind of thing.
“I’ve heard this all before. It comes up when elections come up, unfortunately.”
Lord Bird continued: “Here is a social problem, people ending up on the streets. And if you don’t solve it as a social problem, it often becomes a law and order problem. Then all they do is exacerbate the problems rather than try to address the social problems in the first instance.”
Recently Big Issue reported on the Labour and Conservative party conferences. One of our vendors, Will Payne was invited to speak at both. He shared his experiences with us, and passed on the sentiments of many Tory delegates he spoke to, which suggests the comments of the home secretary might not be shared by all members of the party.
“There’s a message they give me to pass on to Big Issue readers,” Will wrote. “They are shocked by [Suella Braverman’s] language about migrants. Her inflammatory language is affecting them all. They say, every time she opens her mouth, a Tory seat loses 2,000 votes.”
Moving on to targeting people experiencing homelessness today, demonstrating horrifying levels of ignorance about the issue, the home secretary may have lost her party thousands of more votes.
If you want to find out more about the issue, check out the below: